What’s the Value of NaNoWriMo?

At Salon, Laura Millerprotests National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a., NaNoWriMo) and its participants, saying the month-long writing marathon is a waste of time. At the Los Angeles Times book blog Jacket Copy, Carolyn Kelloggdisagrees.

“Megan Gething jumped in to action and tied a pair of shorts around her friend’s leg to slow blood loss, using a tip she learned from the young adult science fiction novels.” A 12-year-old Massachusetts girl used what she read about creating a tourniquet from The Hunger Games to rescue her friend, reports the AP (via Book Riot). Guess the best YA books really do stick with you.

2 comments:

What a dumb response. She did not blame NaNoWriMo for the problem of too few readers & too many writers. No doubt if Kelogg wrote less & read more she’d have better comprehension skills. (Amateur diagnosis.) I couldn’t bother with the rest after that deliberate misinterpretation.

Basically, Miller thinks the whole venture is neither here nor there but all the fundraising & gala efforts would be better served to bolstering readership rather than the neverending supply of writers that abound. Is that an idea so hard to grasp even if one disagrees? Golly.

“He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided later, lying in his bed, after they had played several rounds of various games, and didn’t hunt one another at all.” You probably encountered Richard Connell’sThe Most Dangerous Game at some point during your educational career — you definitely never came across this “comforting and anodyne” version, though.

Here at The Millions, we tend to focus on translation as a literary form, which often leads to debates over how much a translator can change the meaning of a text. However, the majority of translation in the world is far more functional, as it is in the case of basic European bureaucracy. In The Nation, Benjamin Palofftakes a broader look at movements from one language to another. Pair with: Barclay Bram Shoemakeron translatingMo Yan’sFrog.

Random House is releasing a collection of previously unpublished poems and stories from Truman Capote’s youth, recently found in the archives of the New York Public Library. Over at Full Stop, Jacob Kiernanexamines the keen political conscience in Capote’s never-before-published work. As he explains it, “While his early stories are structurally simple, they evince a prescient social conscience.”